20 February 2015

There's a huge difference between "masticophilia" and "mastigophilia"

In the U.S.,there are about half a dozen serious collectors of gum, and more than one serious enough to pay $350 for a stick of Colgan’s Taffy Tolu Chewing Gum, dating from 1900 to 1910...

“A fellow collector and I got a lead on a National Colgan’s Taffy Tolu
gum vendor from a Chicago dealer who had found it in an old barn. We
decided rather than try to outbid each
other, we would make a fair bid
and purchase the machine together. Pleased with our $2,000 purchase, I
took it home and opened it up and cleaned it. I was pleasantly surprised
to find seventeen sticks of Colgan’s Taffy Tolu Chewing Gum inside... In the end, my partner and I sold thirteen sticks of the gum for $300 to
$350 each, making a $4,000 profit without even selling the machine!”

I tried without success to find a word for "lover of gum." The appropriate match for the Greek "-phile" would seem to be "mastic", which is also the word for a Mediterranean evergreen shrub which produces a resin ("mastic tears" at right) used to make varnish and chewing gum. So it should be "masticophile."

But I wouldn't use the word to describe someone in public, because it would sound too much like "mastigophile" -

Mastigophilia: Paraphilic sexuoeroticism that hinges on punishment and humiliation.

A new word for me, but one that I suppose is going to pop up more frequently in the popular press and cyberspace now.

I once collected mutated matches. Not match boxes! But really, the matches themselves if somehow they were odd from the others. I even had a website about them and the design work I had to do as an application to a design school was about them (in parts - and yes, I got in).I don't follow this hobby anymore, but it was fun for a while (I was actually 19/20, not a kid, when I adoped and followed this hobby) and I did have some very precious and strange matches. Sadly, not even the website is up anymore. I still have it ... sometimes I wonder if I should put it up again, just to add a little curious thing to the web. I have some amusing memories from me and my mom sitting in a pub and looking through boxes of freshly bought matches. :)

http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/elfy/38246/664874/664874_900.jpg(That is an overview and a "best of" of my old collection. The first one (left) is not a normal one, but was unually flat. The last one (right) was not unusually shaped, but was upside down in a package. This only "counted" if the certain brand of matches had a "normal" direction. There were brands where this was not the case.)

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
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